the offices of subordinates: he risked dis-
rupting treasured hierarchies. "The job
has not been without its challenges," he
said, in a tone underscoring the scale of
his discretion.
I nfosys, which is worth nearly thirty bil-
lion dollars, makes its money by hiring
young, technologically minded people,
providing them with a comfortable work-
space on one of the company's eleven
Indian campuses-vivid lawns, subsi-
dized meals, gyms, and pools-and then
selling their skills abroad. In the compa-
ny's core business, technicians write and
support custom software that performs
unglamorous tasks, such as inventory and
payroll, for large overseas corporations.
Clients have included Amazon, Apple,
Ford, and Bank of America. A :friend of
Nilekani's recently said, jokingly, of the
back-room dullness of the coding, "It's
shitty work-I could never do it." On
reflection, he added, "But they do build
beautiful processes."
The company was founded in 1981,
when Nilekani was a laconic twenty-six-
year-old. He comes from an educated,
middle-class, English-speaking family.
(T o day, when Nilekani has to make a
speech in Hindi or in Kannada, his re-
gionallanguage, he needs time to pre-
pare.) His father, the manager of a Ban-
galore textile mill, was a leftist-" a socially
conscious citizen," according to Nilekani.
His mother, a college graduate, stayed
home. When Nilekani was twelve, and
his older brother was at college, his father
lost his job, and his parents moved away
from Bangalore in search of work. For the
sake of stability, Nilekani was sent to live
with his uncle, in Dharwad, a town north
of Bangalore. From there, in 1973, he
won a place to study electrical engineering
at the prestigious Indian Institute of
Technology, or I.LT., in Mumbai. He
was an average student but a social leader ,
a wide-ranging reader, and a star of the
college's quiz team. "I had a network,"
he said.
Ramachandra Guha, a writer and his-
torian known best for the book "India
After Gandhi" (2007), first met Nilekani
when their quiz teams faced each other.
Guha, who attended St. Stephen's Col-
lege, in Delhi, told me, "LI.T. is a place
for nerds. Nandan was unusual because he
was extremely laid-back. He wasn't fero-
ciously competitive, talking about how to
n
IJj
"And just where did that extra vowel come from?"
.
get to the States, a scholarship to M.lT.,
that kind of thing." Nilekani's wife, Ro-
hini, a writer whom he met when he was
in college, recalled, "Compared to my
rather staid, middle-class family, he was a
little on the wild side."
Upon graduating, Nilekani became a
trainee at a Mumbai software-engineering
firm. His interviewer was Narayana Mur-
thy. Two and a half years later, Murthy
left the firm to found Infosys, and invited
Nilekani and five others to come with
him. According to Murthy, they started
with two hundred and fifty dollars. In the
early days of the company, Rohini
Nilekani invested several thousand dol-
lars; this has matured into a half-billion-
dollar holding similar to her husband's.
Like him, she now earns millions a year in
dividends and is philanthropically active.
Infosys was unusually committed to
principles of fairness and transparency.
Vijay Nilekani, Nandan's older brother,
who works for the Nuclear Energy Insti-
tute, in Washington, D.C., told me that
Nandan's young company was put at risk
by its refusal to bribe the Bangalore tele-
phone department. "Theywere not going
to feed the system," he said.
For much of the nineteen-eighties,
Nilekani lived in the U.S., embedded
with Infosys clients in Union City, New
Jersey, and Skokie, Illinois, among other
places. In 1993, he and his co-founders
became rich when Infosys went public in
India. By then, the government, which
had long leaned toward socialism, had
.
begun to enact pro-business reforms. (For
two decades, Infosys and its competitors
have paid no tax on overseas earnings.) In
1999, Infosys became the first Indian
company to be listed on a North Ameri-
can stock exchange. Three years later,
Murthy stepped aside, and Nilekani be-
came C.E.O. The company's rate of an-
nual growth accelerated, reaching :fifty per
cent in 2005. "He pressed on the pedal,"
Murthy said of Nilekani's tenure, when
we spoke on the phone. Murthy also
noted, with perhaps only an accidental
hint of myth containment, that "the N an-
dan period was really the golden period,
as far as the market was concerned. And
he did a good job. He's very good at net-
working, he's very good at schmoozing."
In these years, Nilekani became a board
member of the foundation that runs the
Davos summits, and he was lauded in
Thomas Friedman's "The World Is Flat,"
in which he is credited with inspiring the
ruling metaphor by saying something
rather different ("Tom, the playing field
is being leveled"). Nilekani told me, with
a shrug, "I became a member of the global
superclass, as they call it."
Nilekani handed over his C.E.O. po-
sition to a successor in 2007, but he stayed
at the company as co-chairman, and
began writing a book, "Imagining India,"
a smart, social-democratic reading of the
country, in which his anxiety about na-
tional shortcomings-education, in-
equality, urban infrastructure-was offset
by confidence about the reforming
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 3, 2011 29